The everlasting warping process

I'm now tackling the task that I dreaded. Out of every skill associated with this project, the only thing I hadn't actually done before was lash an entire shed of the warp to a stationary shed rod. I had no trouble figuring out how I wanted to work the lashing. It took some thinking to figure out how I wanted to keep it even: I decided to just go ahead and mark the rod. It took me even longer to work up the nerve to try it.

So first I began lashing the warp ends in groups of three. After an inch I got brave and tried groups of two, then finally tried lashing every warp end. I can do it! It's very fiddly at this sett, and the bobbins I'm using to hold my thread are less than optimal. I'm using 4" boat shuttle bobbins; I'd prefer using tapestry bobbins but don't have any.

I finished 5" of lashing and had to take a break because my eyes and threads were crossing so much! Instead, I finished weighing all my new loomweights.

The new weights range in weight from 193 to 224 grams apiece. Most of them (87 of the 120) weigh somewhere between 207 and 216 grams. There's one extreme outlier at 193 grams, and a nearly perfectly matched pair at the heavy end that I've earmarked for the selvedges.

I expect that lashing the shed will go somewhat like lacing the header band. Sooner or later I'll figure out a really quick, simple, ergonomically superior way to do it and it'll go smoothly. Until that point, I'm going to be pretty twitchy.

I'm a weaver, not a stitcher!

I'm at a boring part of the work now. First I am stitching the header band onto a stiffening rod. When I finish that I'll lash the stiffening rod to the cloth beam. Both these tasks are essentially needlework. I am, at best, an indifferent stitcher. Although I enjoy working on the occasional hand-sewn item, and I've even turned my hand to embroidery from time to time, I just don't care for needlework the way I care for most other forms of thread manipulation.

But I feel very strongly that the more carefully this particular task proceeds, the better will be the finished product. I've had problems with the equivalent of reed marks in warp-weighted loom textiles when I have cut corners in this phase of the work. In this case, I'm stitching the band between every set of four threads (two warp loops), that is, six stitches through the warp and around the stiffening rod per inch of header band. That should give me an absolutely reliable attachment which will keep the band from developing scalloping. The fine linen I'm using for the stitching is small enough to sneak between the threads without creating any holes that won't heal.

Over the years I've fooled around with the ergonomics of this task. Normally I am working with much shorter warps, and I have a slightly different set of equipment because I'm doing it in the field, on trestles set up under a pavilion top. Most of those established techniques won't work with the setup I currently have (based on home space limitations), and I need a different tool than a tapestry needle. So now I've fiddled around with setup, seating, tools, and zone of attack until I have finally found a method that works for me and is fairly quick. That's good, because the first foot of stitching took more than half an hour. The next four inches took another half hour. That's when I fell back, reassessed, and changed what I was doing.

Now that I can stitch an inch of header warp firmly in just a minute or so, I feel like I can settle down for a long stint of work. So now I'm going to set up some music to listen to and wade back into the fray.